Adobe Flash Player 10.2 beta for Android 3.0 Honeycomb [video]

When Motorola launched their Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola XOOM, they hadn’t yet blessed the device with support for Adobe Flash web content. Now, all that has changed. Motorola and Adobe have made good on their promise of rolling out Adobe Flash Player 10.2 to the XOOM – as well as Android 3.0 Honeycomb, Android 2.2 Froyo, and Android 2.3 Gingerbread devices – finally bringing the full web experience to the latest Android devices on market today. For those of you interested, Flash Player 10.2 is available as a final release for all smartphones running Froyo and above (2.2+) and as a beta for Honeycomb tablets in the Android Market as an official download. For those of you curious to see what Flash Player 10.2 looks like on Honeycomb, keep reading.

Adobe tells us that the new Flash Player requires close integration with the new Honeycomb web browser, which requires both Adobe and Google to work together to optimize code. Developers on both sides are apparently still hard at work to put the final touches on hardware graphics acceleration and Stage Video hardware accelerated HD video decoding. As such, this current release of the Flash Player 10.2 is being called a”beta” for Honeycomb devices – it’s considered a final release for compatible smartphones.

Still, even in its “beta” stage for Honeycomb, Adobe Flash 10.2 Player performs well. There are still some issues with the content lagging behind your input (scrolling, manipulating complex Flash elements, etc.), but once you let the page load in its entirety, it performs well. Don’t expect to be able to run multiple browser tabs, all with intense Flash content, smoothly – that would just be unrealistic (to put it kindly). But, because Flash Player 10.2 works with the browser to treat Flash content as part of the page, and not an overlay, you’ll immediately notice smoother performance when scrolling through a webpage.